TI2011 Spring 2020 – Page 27 – Project Evaluation and Management

The Sinister Minister Belok

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Sometimes you have to admit that not all the people during is useful. The problem with this is that maybe the problem can be your employer. Such is the case of the Minister Belok.

He is an ambitious man that does not listen to reasons. He is not able to see the big picture, and of course a knucklehead.

El Tiempo Es Dinero. Reloj Que Se Deshace A Dólares. Modelo 3d ...

This kind of person is very dangerous when they are above you in a project development. They like to establish Pathological Politics and once they do that you will have to be willing to put your job on the line any day, but even if do so, you will have problems. Often this politics are characterized for being goals of personal power and for try to override the natural goals of an organization.

The problem with this kind of politics is that it becomes unsafe to have a small development team.

An of course, as well as Mr. Thompkins you may have only one option: To do exactly like they told you. This is often a bad approach, but sometimes it’s the only way.

Management and Management: The Deadline Chapters 8 and 9

--Originally published at TI2011 – Luis Wilson

I seriously don’t know what it is with Lahksa and deceiving people, but at least she gets the plot going.

So, chapter 8. This one had a lot of management/productivity jargon and discussion which I had trouble keeping track of. Fortunately, we have Tompkins’ end-of-chapter notes which I plan to discuss in a moment.

In this chapter, Lahksa tricks a guy (Dr. Hector Rizolli) into thinking that he is going to Latvia (but is in reality arriving at Morovia). Apparently, this guy has some real expertise in controlled experiments regarding project management, so it fits Tompkins’ and Lahksa’s needs perfectly.

Dr. Rizolli makes a keynote, etc. etc. and at the end of his multiple-day journey at ‘Latvia’, Tompkins gets real with this guy and asks him some serious questions that can help his not-so little experiment. Im going to piggyback on Tompkins’ notes because a LOT was said in a short amount of time.

What I think is most important to realize is that productivity improves in the long term. It’s not something that is wasily quantifiable either, because it involves people, people’s performance, the managers, the projects, and whatever else happens around them.

The other important thing, in my opinion is that project management is risk management. It is important to predict them, how it will affect the team and how to reduce the negative impact on performance. Of course, you need someone in charge of these tasks, it’s not something that it’s okay to let aside.

Chapter 9. The interviews keep going on, and the team is starting to shape up nicely (at least for now). Bringing General Markov into the team is giving our main characters a fresh look on management that will certainly look useful. I dont remember who said it exactly Continue reading "Management and Management: The Deadline Chapters 8 and 9"

First partial reflection

--Originally published at Erick learning experience

First I would like to talk about all the tools I have learned to use, first one before the class I had heard about wordpress but I have never tried before that and now I know some basic things about it and how you can make complex web pages with some facilities that wordpress offer and you can make your own plugins to make your web page a lot more personalized.

Another important tool that I have learned in the class was the use of wiki, before the class I had never tried to do something with wiki and I didn’t realized the importance of share knowledge and be able to edit some pages that someone else made to add more important knowledge, some other thing I learned was some of the syntax to use in this tool.

Now talking about the guest speakers that came to the class the one I like the most was of the person that told us about the importance of personal finances and why is important to start saving some part of our salaries for when we grow older we can have financial freedom because some statistics that he showed us were very scary of how many people is going to be struggling in the matter of money in comparison of how many people are going to achieve the financial freedom. When he started to talk about real estate it was very interesting of how a house that before costs a prize with the capital gain you get after some years are a big deal, but you have to have vision and think in a long or medium term to get some benefit from that.

Then about the reading of the book The deadline somethings that I consider important are first when you are

Chapter 11

--Originally published at Erick learning experience

At the beginning of the chapter it was funny how Mr. Tompkins said that he was happy with his life in Morovia and being “fired” kidnapped really was the luckiest thing can happen to him, because thanks to that he was working there and has the opportunity to learn a lot of things but I don’t want to get kidnapped.

One thing I consider important is how Mr. Tompkins mentioned that he was going to had a brainstorming session about a problem they need to solve about the time of a project, I have read about the importance of brainstorming and in the book the startup equation it mention that brainstorming is a good way to create new ideas but it is important first to do this exercise alone so in this way you can think in crazy ideas without worry about what people will think about that and then when you have few ideas you can pass to the next stage that would be brainstorming with your team and in this way you can obtain better ideas or complete the idea someone proposed.

When Mr. Tompkins was so happy about how the project was running and the team he was working with then the NNL go away and let Belok take the leadership, so Belok had the incredible idea to reduce the time to finish the project and he said that deadline was just ambition but possible and he start making the assumption that incrementing the number of people in the teams will make the project finish faster but that was not true because when new people integrates in the project they consume time of the people that have been in the project and have experience.

Another thing I did not consider appropriate was when Belok intimidate Mr. Tompkins Continue reading "Chapter 11"

Why you should consider working from home (even after the end of the pandemic)

--Originally published at Blog de Célia

Working from home it’s now something we all experiment because of the recent events that happen worldwide (Coronavirus – COVID19). At the beginning, it could be strange to not move from your house the morning when you’re supposed to go to school and that you finally just put your computer on and start your class. For the majority, working from home is something unusual and we need to do many adjustments in the way we’re doing our daily tasks.

My personal experience with that (after only one week of online TEC class): it’s way more difficult that I thought before. I’m not used to have class at home and even the teachers are not used to that. I get rapidly more distract, because of the noise (I live with 15 other roomies), sometimes WIFI is so bad that I can barely hear the class. Sometimes I feel that I’m bringing school in my privacy. However, it’s great that we still can have class because of all the technology we have, we still can be all connected to each other, we can still work on our group project. I need to get more organise and to be more concentrate (it’s not always easy when you see the blue sky outside and that it could be so easy to just go outside and do nothing). I still prefer having class on the campus, I prefer to keep house to be a place where I can rest without any stress. I know it something we have to do right now for public health but I still hoping we will be back to TEC at the end of the semester (I’m an eternal dreamer).

Although, for some companies and some people this sanitary crisis didn’t change so

Home Office

--Originally published at Site Title

Nowadays with the pandemic of COVID-19 the life of most of the people have changed, for students it become kind of easy is just staying in home and assist to online classes, maybe is harder to keep focus or do all the work in home. However, the big problem begins when you have a job.

With the situation that we live every government recommends stay in home for the own security. Nonetheless, the economy and life keeps going and people must find a way to maintain their job and incomes.

Home office arrived as a good alternative to hold up the work avoiding contact with people. Working in home at first is kind of hard, is a challenge to do everything through screen and discover how to feel comfortable and not be distracted in your home.

This is a privilege that not everybody can enjoy, not all the works are suitable for it.

For managers change all the dynamic, due most of them use to supervise the work passing to the office of an employee or face to face talk about the advance, but being behind a screen depends on trust. For some jobs is easy to keep the record of the work done, you can have the files and reports, but for others it become hard to know if the employee is really doing his job, everything depends on trust and control.

There are a lot of tools for this remote work like zoom, where you can have virtual meetings with your partners and also if you need to have a private conversation with one employee you can do it directly without problems.

Some software companies have used long ago this model and they share that the basis is the trust of the employee. Besides they share that a Continue reading "Home Office"

More for less

--Originally published at Site Title

Is amazing the way finance work in the industry and big companies, how this can make every decision in a project as long as money can be saved.

In the chapter 11 of The Deadline I learn how the thing that makes a company move is the money and most of the decisions made it at the end depend directly on how the finance of the project were or if the boss decide to cut the budget.

Once a professor at college told me: when you are the head of the project, you must always require more(money, time, resources) that you need, because at the end the person above you would try to cut cost to be more efficient, besides, you must always have a plan B to proceed if the things have to change drastically.

Is not easy to be a manager and less when everyday cost a quarter million dollars, for this reason you should be surrounded by people that can help you to continue the project no matter the adversities, because they will come and you must be prepare.

Finance and Politics are the most difficult part of any project.

Chapter 11 reflection

--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management

Chapter 11: The Sinister Minister Belok

Photo by **emre keshavarz** in **Pexels**

On a cool spring morning in Moravia. Mr. T on his way to work, the morning is perfect to enjoy and breathe the freshness of a new day as he walks to Aidrivoli Campus. The path where he walks is beautiful because it crossesy the vineyards and along the side of a little brook. Although you think that he only walked from A to B every day, but in Morovia this can be completely different since you can see many more things than we could find in any city. Mr. T has been for more than 3 months in Morovia and did not remember what it is to have such a happy day in his life, only in Morovia has he achieved this.

To many of us it happens that sometimes we do not appreciate the paths that lead us to work, or to school and when we really stay to observe those paths we realize things as simple as colors or people who could be there every day. or some particularity of some facade. Normally we are always thinking about whether we will be on time, where we will find parking or anything else.

Mr. T was optimistic about some of the smaller projects that might be complete by then, however a project like PShop that is one of the biggest might come a year later than planned. in that project at least, was to figure out some way to gain a full year. For now, he could relax and feel good about all the things that were going right. NNL seemed like a pretty sensible fellow once Mr. T had taken a firm stand and laid down the law to him.

Hunches and gut

--Originally published at Site Title

Normally when we find ourselves taking the lead in a project most of the decisions made it are based in our hunches and gut feeling, in other words, experience of how things use to work for us. Occasionally they are good and others result to be pretty bad.

Sometimes, when a person use to take good decisions people think, that person have really good hunches. However, the reality is he has a good model of how things work and are affected by different variables and can make calculations of how things will end and what would be necessary to achieve the goal.

But if in your case your hunches are not good at all or you want to improve it to get more effective decisions, you can make it happen developing your model on paper or in a software, where you can visualize what variables you are using, which ones are missing and which ones you do not need. With this action you can realize about how you were doing things wrong and how to improve, this is really importan in big projects to make a good decision and not end up regretting.

In this way, if you put attention on the most important aspects of a process you can be a step ahead and make the good choices and the good moments.

Administrar proyectos y… morir a los 45 reflexiones de un parcial

--Originally published at TI2011 – Press enter to continue…

Volvemos al español, el idioma con el que me siento mas cómodo! Después de que la pandemia interrumpiera la temporada escolar y los exámenes parciales, regreso con una reflexión parcial para la materia de administración de proyecto. Un pequeño parentesis, hablando de la pandemia, espero que quien sea que lea esto se encuentre bien junto … Continue reading Administrar proyectos y… morir a los 45 reflexiones de un parcial